Janna van Hasselt

Ōtautahi Christchurch

Janna completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking at Ilam School of Fine Arts in 2004. A Fulbright Award lured her to Chicago in 2012, where she discovered the chromatically intense work of US artists Judy Ledgerwood and Polly Apfelbaum. Janna received a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, specialising in ceramic sculpture.

Janna is attracted to an excess of juxtaposing forms and simultaneous contrasts. The idea of beauty and awkwardness both being present in a piece intrigues and delights her. Janna’s work combines print, paint, fabric, ceramics and more recently photography.

My work celebrates playfulness, theatricalization, exaggeration and exuberance. There is a ludic sensibility between the planar play and the sculptural field, creating an ambiguous sense of figure and ground with pieces reading as figurative portraits. I am working in the mode of enjoyment and appreciation rather than judgment.

There is a constant shift between two and three dimensions and different scales. Pieces are in a dynamic and ever evolving dialogue; each piece informing the next with relationships evident between form, surface and material. By spending time with my work, my aim is for the viewer to slowly uncover the coherent balance of explanations and punch lines.